Sanaa, Yemen – At 7am, Qasim, 14, rises and begins his daily struggle. He leaves his family’s rented apartment, carrying a white sack about one metre long and half a metre wide. He hopes to fill it by 11:30am.Qasim collects plastic bottles. A sack full of these bottles can earn him up to 1,500 Yemeni riyal, about $3. Buyers gather these items to be recycled in factories.Recommended Stories list of 3 itemsend of listThat money helps Qasim buy lunch for his six-member family. In the afternoon, he can be a child again, sometimes playing football with other children in the neighbourhood.But that’s when it’s the turn of Qasim’s brother, 12-year-old Asem, to collect bottles, which he then sells at night. That helps cover the family’s dinner costs.To Qasim and Asem, schooling is a luxury that the family cannot afford. Instead, the priority is meeting the family’s daily living expenses.“I was studying at a government school in Sanaa. When I reached the fourth grade in 2024, I stopped going to the classroom. I wanted to help provide for my family, and my brother did the same in 2025,” Qasim tells Al Jazeera, wiping his hollow cheeks with his right hand.“Sitting in the classroom would not feed me,” Qasim says in a low voice as he gazes at his sack in a busy neighbourhood in Sanaa.For more than a decade, Yemen has been embroiled in a bloody co …
